Rare and hardest to crack Enigma code machine sells for $437k | Hacker News Reader

Rare and hardest to crack Enigma code machine sells for $437k

zdnet.com

131 pointsBender58 comments

In the Boston area there is a guy who reliably attends ham radio and antique radio swap meets (Flea at MIT, NEARC)- he always shows off his Enigma machines. This adds tremendously to the atmosphere of these events, and I always appreciate seeing his exhibit.

Damn Covid, these shows are all canceled for now..

The MIT flea is awesome and I've met him a few times. Definitely visit if you get the chance.

It's HN so most of you probably already know and love Neal Stephenson's writing, but any time Enigma comes up I feel compelled to recommend "Cryptonomicon", one of my all-time favorite novels in any genre.

I want to love that book -- it's everything I'm interested in -- but oh my god that book is so verbose. For example, he spends 1.5 pages describing what the clouds in the sky look like and it has nothing to do with the plot. I tried twice to read it but gave up at halfway. It's 918 pages, but I think it could lose at least 300 pages and still keep all the brilliant ideas. If someone created a condensed version of it, I think the book could reach a whole new audience.

I always felt like an inferior geek for not liking that book and others.

I never felt that way about the book. He is verbose, but it all contributes in some way.

A lot of writing is setting things up, and he does it so masterfully in Cryptonomicon.

I learned patience reading Moby Dick at 14, after trying and failing at 12. I am now a very patient person. And I treasure the concept of the end of a sentence.

My solution is using audible, and listen through the book during whatever time that I can just do passive listening.

Just finished the power broker, with 50 hours+ time.

I think audible is particularly good for light content, novels, biography, etc.

Audible for things with dense content, like historical studies are not working well. I listened 20+ hours of the fall and decline of Rome, and I cannot even remember the names of the Rome emperors mentioned so far.

Yeah, I think a lot of that comes down to whether you enjoy his writing style. I would read what Stephenson writes even if it's devoid of ideas, just for the joy of the style.

For myself, the scene where he describes Randy eating breakfast in Cryptonomican is one of my favourite passages in any book (partly because I identify with the source material :-) ), but others have cited that to me as an example of gross excess.

Reminds me of Stephen King novels.

I listened to it as a book on tape on a very long road trip and it was perfect. Don't think I could have made it through otherwise.

I have never under stood the dislike of longer form writing - this is part of Stephenson's style.

You don't think say the digression on the Galvanick Lucifer isn't a glorious read?

Paraphrasing another quote: reading a novel is like inviting an author over as a house-guest for a few days; reading a Neal Stephenson novel is like having him sleep on your couch for a month, coming and going at all hours of the day.

If you want a mathematically treatment, The Pleasures of Counting is an excellent book about this and sundry other marvelous topics.

Even the index of The Pleasures of Counting has its gems. (A footnote remarks that a discarded alternative for the title had been The Joy of x.)

On having broken 4-rotor Naval enigma decisively (p.389): "A more demonstrative age might have celebrated such a victory with a massive piece of statuary, perhaps showing a handsome but well-draped female representing Science with the armoured God of War prostate under her foot, or perhaps the giant figures of Blackett and Turing gazing forever over the Western Approaches."

Honestly, I don't think Stephenson is a very good writer. His writing is didactic and pompous. William Gibson on the other hand crafts perfect sentences, each and every time.

I read cryptonomicon when I was 15 and thoroughly convinced myself that it was "awesome." After reading it again when I was older, I realized that I wanted to like it, because of what it said about the kind of person I aspired to be at the time.

So a Norwegian ex-colleague of mine randomly found a very pristine Enigma machine in the attic of his parents house (presumably left there by a grandparent, who had likely gotten hold of it in the spring/summer of 1945, somehow), about 13 years ago. I was a bit jealous about that find. Apparently only 250 or so remain, altogether.

Photos here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20070622082533/http://my.opera.c...

(The guy who took/posted the photos is separate from the lucky guy who found it. Please don't bother him.)

"Enigma machine at Opera", so this ex-colleague of yours work at Opera the ex-awesome browser making company?

Yeah, we both worked there at the time. Back when it was actually awesome :).

Back then (2003,2004) Opera showed me what the web could be. The tool outshined everything else on the market. Hell, I remember loving dragonfly and presto and it's what got me interested in web stuff. So thanks!

That's great!

I used to work there too, those were really fun times.

The photos of that enigma are amazing! It looks like it was taken straight off the factory floor.

"New Old Stock" indeed.

> he declared that the Allies could not possibly have deciphered his Enigma messages

One should always assume deciphering.

I would have used one-time pads on top of the Enigma. There weren't that many U-boots, so it should have been workable.

Their first mistake was rolling their own crypto. Never roll your own crypto.

To be fair, those days there (fortunately) wasn't really a useful cryptographic standard to use.

What do you think the present-day cryptological equivalent of the Enigma machine and its decryption is? I’m most interested in examples of consequence (e.g. saving lives by shortening war) rather than comparisons of technical achievement.

Things are quite different these days. Code makers seem to have run far in advance of code breakers.

Since there are no major wars running, if someone did break something significant they would save it for later.

And yet I feel we are living in the golden age of signals intelligence. The only reason to not say that is because trends point towards an even better golden age. Already the scale of the open source stuff out there has never existed before. And then add speculative stuff like saving encrypted content to decrypt it later decades down the line when methods and hardware have improved. Just a single insider can walk out with an USB stick full of the crown jewels of a place supposed to keep secrets... Pretty sure the US intelligence community didn't have records of basic data of each individual living in europe in WW2 times, but they certainly do now, simply thanks to electronic records systems collecting the data and them just having to harvest the data fruits whether it's by hacking or other means.

Mostly, yes. Though for perspective: when engaged in a hot war you tend not to care too much about what your opponent can figure out in a few decades.

Even enigma would have been mostly good enough, if the allies had taken a few weeks to decrypt each message.

In peace time learning old secrets is comparatively more useful.

> when engaged in a hot war you tend not to care too much about what your opponent can figure out in a few decades.

IDK if the allies would have had a list of gay Germans from encrypted data they collected decades prior they could have used that data for extortion. Even if it took decades of progress, they'd have had ample time. The question is, does collecting data now put you into a better position than not having such collections. And the answer is maybe to yes. Even if it's just maybe it's probably worth the investment for the DoD.

Did the NSDAP even bother to encrypt their little lists[1]? I'd thought they kept them in the clear, on IBM punched cards.

For an interesting Paperclip-like connection to the founding of the BND, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Scherhorn#Aftermath

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWo_3CIcTBQ

You are illustrating what I said about the advantages of long term projects in peace time. Yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EncroChat:

“EncroChat was a Europe-based communications network and service provider allegedly used by organized crime members to plan criminal activities. Police infiltrated the network between at least March and June 2020 during a Europe-wide investigation. An unidentified source associated with EncroChat announced on the night of 12–13 June 2020 that the company would cease operations because of the police operation.

The service had around 60,000 subscribers at the time of its closure. At least 800 arrests have been made across Europe as of 7 July 2020”

Four rotors. Now that would tire out your fingers.

The limitation on the number of rotors is key pressure. A 3-rotor Enigma has a huge key travel and you have to push hard. (I've had the opportunity.) The friction between the contacts is high. That's why these machines were not built with enough rotors to be really secure.

The next step up was the Lorenz 10-rotor machine, but that had to be motorized. But the crypto design of that was botched, and it's easy to crack. A real 10-rotor alphabetical Enigma-like machine without a "reflector" would have been secure against any attacks of the period.

Instead of a reflector, they could have used 27 contacts, and either had a 27th lightbulb to indicate the output was the same as the input, or made each key a dual-throw dual-post switch so that the 27th output would get wired to light up the switch corresponding to the input key. That would remove the weakness that no letter is ever enciphered as itself.

Edit: never mind: you'd actually need 28 contacts, since the reflector can only reflect an even number of contacts. With an even number of unused contacts on the input side of the rotor stack, you could connect them together in pairs to get extra passes through the rotor stacks. If they added / (for use as a number shift symbol, so 1123 would be /AABC/ ) to their alphabet, then they could use 28 contacts and have something like described above. However, without modifying the alphabet space to have an odd number of symbols, all other workarounds I can think of require an odd number of used inputs at the one end of the rotor stack and and even number of contacts at the reflector end.

The Germans used Q or Z as their number shift symbol when enciphering digits for Enigma traffic, correct?

> The Germans used Q or Z as their number shift symbol when enciphering digits for Enigma traffic, correct?

In the few random decrypts I looked at (from U-Boat traffic), e.g., https://enigma.hoerenberg.com/index.php?cat=The%20U534%20mes... numbers were spelled out.

> But the crypto design of that was botched, and it's easy to crack.

This seems like it depends upon a perspective unavailable at the time.

Until June 1943 (by which point Germany has in fact lost the war though it will fight on for a long while, the Eastern Front campaign is going terribly and the United States is increasingly diverting resources to a "Europe First" strategy which Germany can't conceivably overpower) the only breaks of Lorenz at Bletchley were based on what they called depth. Multiple ciphertexts using the same key, a fatal flaw for a cryptosystem even today.

For example a German radio operator begins encoding and transmitting an important message, and then is interrupted by some matter, after a few minutes they begin again but use the same key because it hasn't been impressed upon them that they absolutely must use a fresh key each time. If they make even a trivial typographical error the two ciphertexts will be different and that's enough to recover the messages.

Only in July 1943 do Bletchley begin actually decrypting any messages for which there is no depth. They do this because they have a (very primitive) electronic codebreaking machine, something that has never before existed. This machine is unsatisfactory in many ways but it's ludicrously faster than manual codebreaking.

So it seems unfair to critique Lorenz based on the fact that a suitably powerful electronic machine can break it. No such machines had ever existed before. Plus it took several years to even conceive of how to do the attack before the machine could be built, because of course programmable computers didn't exist yet.

> Multiple ciphertexts using the same key, a fatal flaw for a cryptosystem even today.

To avoid confusing readers, one should mention that modern ciphers separate the key, which can be reused but must be kept secret, from the initialization vector (IV), which must not be reused but can be transmitted in the clear.

These correspond roughly to the Enigma's daily settings and per-message rotor start positions, but AIUI the procedure for selecting and transmitting the latter changed over the course of the war, and at times insecure even if done according to the procedure.

It was actually far worse for the Lorenz (Tunny) traffic. The wheel patterns - the equivalent of the key in, say, AES - were changed quite infrequently early on. The five χ-wheels (in Bletchley parlance) were only changed monthly, while the five ψ-wheels were changed quarterly. While the two μ-wheel patterns were changed daily, there was little consideration given to what those patterns actually were. The χ-wheels generated the first of two sets of bit patterns to be XORed with the plain text; the ψ-wheels generated the second set. That would have been fine, except that the two μ-wheels together determined whether or not the ψ-wheels advanced - μ1 advanced on every keystroke along with the χ-wheels, μ2 would advance only if μ1 was a 1, and the ψ-wheels advanced only if μ2 was a 1 - and bad patterns on the ψ-wheels would mean that the ψ-wheels would be essentially frozen for extended runs of the message. What was meant to introduce a sort of dither to make it harder to determine how the key was being generated became the Achilles heel that highlighted the mechanism. (Not to take anything away from Bill Tutte and the rest of the crew at all. There was still a lot of cleverness and tedious attention to detail involved.) With a month of life on the χ patterns and three months on ψ, depths and near-depths on the message settings (the nonce or IV) were absolute killers. Later on, all of the wheel patterns were changed daily, and the μ-wheel patterns were verified for short stall lengths, but by then the machine's mechanism was well understood, pattern-derivation methods had been devised, and Colossus had largely eliminated the χ component from the puzzle.

The phrase "and bad patterns on the ψ-wheels" should have read "and bad patterns on the μ-wheels". Sorry if there was any confusion; I caught that too late for editing.

We're discussing (in this sub-thread) Lorenz rather than Enigma. But yes, the per-message rotor positions are what would be repeated resulting in "depth".

Yeah, I got side-tracked in the middle of writing my comment, and it didn't seem worth fixing since I only noticed after the edit window closed and my main point holds either way.

How do these come into private possession?

Actually in general, what _should_ happen to the property of a government that gets dismantled?

On the one hand, this stuff probably gets into private hands by theft at some point, and it hardly seems just to legitimize opportunistic plundering.

On the other hand ... the state which owned it went out of existence. It's not as though there was a German government whose property rights were being infringed.

Perhaps the Allies could have fastidiously gathered all the assets of the German military and held a big liquidation sale at Alexanderplatz, and used the proceeds to buy food for the refugee camps.

>It's not as though there was a German government whose property rights were being infringed

It's pretty common to regard a country as having a claim on looted artifacts even after a change in government. It kind of seems to be taken for granted in a lot of discussions.

e.g. https://www.npr.org/2018/06/28/623537440/hobby-lobbys-illega...

Nobody seems to particularly care whether the Sumerians, or the city of Irisagrig, still exist.

> On the other hand ... the state which owned it went out of existence.

The current German government sees itself as the successor to the previous German governments.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_Germany for more detail than you ever wanted to know.

Exactly. It was Germany--the same one that exists today--that marched into its neighbors, conquering them and enslaving segments of their population. In the U.S., it's common to hear people say "The Nazis invaded Poland" or "The Nazis bombed London" but if you go to Poland, they'll say "The Germans invaded us" and if you go to London they'll say "The Germans bombed us."

I don't know why it's common to pretend otherwise.

When speaking about the state, I (UK) fairly often hear people refer to "Nazi Germany", instead of just Germany (and sometimes used as "Nazi Germany invaded Poland"). With the people though, it's generally just "the Germans".

> the state which owned it went out of existence

Not really. They just got new elected officials. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_of_Germany

Like payphones after a disaster

Warbooty both on a personal level and at the state level - operation paperclip etc.

My first job was based on campus at Cranfield University and they had v1 and v2 parts left over from post ww2 analysis.

If you go to Bovingdon tank museum - there are a number of exabits from the Gulf wars

On that note, I just finished a very interesting biography of Elizebeth Smith Friedman who is a total unsung hero and the founding mother of the science of cryptography. Her team with the Coast Guard cracked enigmas in parallel to Turing. The Woman Who Smashed Codes, by Jason Fagone.

Was hoping someone at least bid a prime number. Sadly, $437 is also divisible by 19 and 23

The actual number was £347,250, which is £17 over the nearest prime number. In USD, the actual number was $437,955 (headline rounds down for some reason), $2 over the nearest prime. They were probably limited to 250$ differences, though, and 347 is prime, so that's something.

Primes are pretty dense. So any random amount will be close to a prime number.

The enigma's encryption didn't have anything to do with primes though :) It was just a super complex automated substitution.

I believe Romania still has some of those left from switching sides in WW2.

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